Do iPhones secretly use infrared flashes to take and store pictures of your face? No, that's not true: On models that support it, iPhones have an Attention Aware feature, which checks if you're looking at the device to prevent it from locking or dimming the screen, and a Face ID feature, to provide authentication through facial recognition. Both features don't "steal" pictures of the user, and can be disabled.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on January 3, 2024. The video shows someone holding what is described as an iPhone, with an infrared camera pointed at him, and every few seconds flashes appear from the device when the person holding the phone is looking at it. A text overlay (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
Your iPhone secretly takes a picture of your face every five seconds. If they monitor your actions then they also record every sound that enters your microphone. You should really consider the purpose of this data collection and what it will affect.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Jan 18 08:48:22 2024 UTC)
There are several home devices (archived here) that use infrared light technology, i.e. technology based on electromagnetic waves that are invisible to the human eye, such as remote controls, infrared cookers, thermometers or phones. In the case of the iPhone in the video, the device is shown performing its Attention Aware feature (archived here), which detects whether the user is engaged with it or not to decide whether to take other steps such as dimming the screen or locking the device, Apple's website explains in the Support section. Similarly, Amazon's Alexa Echo Hub device (archived here), a smart home control panel for managing home appliances, also uses infrared technology to detect whether the user is nearby.
The iPhone also uses infrared technology for its Face ID function, but again, this is used to unlock and authorize different functions, not to "steal" or permanently store photos of users' faces. Apple's website also explains that the TrueDepth camera captures accurate facial data by projecting and analyzing thousands of invisible dots to create a depth map of your face, capturing an infrared image of the user´s face and transforming it into a mathematical representation. Both the Face ID function and the Attention Awareness features can be disabled on the devices at any time, the company says on its customer support website pages (archived here).
The Face ID, which is based on an algorithm that creates a mathematical model of the user's face, is stored locally on the device, and is not sent to Apple, or any other third party, according to the company. Apple says it designed Face ID to protect privacy (archived here) and that it does not store any images that could be used to identify people.
